Personnel monitoring is being utilized in various installations, for example, oil and gas refineries, for security of the perimeter under monitoring, general security of the plant, and human personnel monitoring for accidents.
One common way of personnel monitoring that can be considered even by any layman is to place video cameras for surveillance. While this approach is being utilized in various installations, it still remains constrained with a number of shortcomings, e.g., initial cost of camera based network including wired or wireless infrastructure, need for constant operator-based operation, very expensive intelligent software is required if fully automated and yet the reliability is quite low, privacy issues, extremely difficult to re-locate/re-configure in case of wired system, very large bandwidth requirements for wireless operation.
RFID based inventory tracking has been in use in the industry for more than a decade now and has essentially become an important component of fast and reliable inventory control, tracking, and updates. However, the use of RFID for human personnel monitoring is quite new. Efforts have been made for the utilization of the RFID advance power through intelligent software applications for human personnel monitoring in a specific distress situations, such as, evacuations in order to identify the patterns in the movement so that appropriate measures can be taken to remove the shortcomings in the flow of the tracked movement. Similar attempts have been made to identify patterns in specific traffic or pedestrian movements in order to get trend information for better planning and development applications.
Often a time a human operator would enter an area of H2S leak and would not know of its presence due to odorless and colorless nature of the gas. This exposure not only could be fatal for that operator but could also be the starting point of a major leak. The existing personnel monitoring system fail to teach or suggest means for detecting H2S whose leakage is one of the prime interests to the Oil &Gas sector.
Despite the advances in RFID devices, the utilization of RFID advance power through intelligent software applications for performing behavior-based source monitoring or tracking remain unanswered because presently no system is available in the commercial market which is capable of overcoming above listed constraints and performing behavior-based source monitoring to detect location of the source and gas leakage with a time stamp without using the video.
Accordingly, in view of the disadvantages inherent in the conventional personal monitoring system, there exists a need for video-less personnel monitoring means capable of overcoming the disadvantages inherent in the existing personal monitoring system and providing effective system for behavior-based source monitoring being utilized in various installations including oil and gas refineries, for security of the perimeter under monitoring, general security of the plant, leakage of gas, and human personnel monitoring for accidents.